Measuring power supply use accurately...

I have a Gateway GM5478 and I am suffering from the random restart glitch. At first I was wondering if I needed to get the BIOS patch for my computer but I read a interesting article on Tech Support Guy between someone with a GM5478 and a tech supporter and he had the same exact symptoms as me. Computer revs fan up really high for several seconds, restarts, comes back to Windows Vista log in screen for me to sign in again.

Even though all my devices, as for as Vista is concerned, are installed and working fine I wanted to rule out the PSU for now. I have a 400 watt power supply that came with the PC. A NVIDIA 9600 GT, Soundblaster X-Fi sound cards, 2x1 GB RAM DDR2 PC2 667 MHz RAM, 500 GB Western Digital WDC WD5000AAKS-00TMA0 Hard Drive, Intel Quad Core 2 @2.4 Ghz each, Intel Schroeder Town G33 motherboard. The Computer also has a Logitech Optical mouse and Gateway keyboard (obviously) a microphone headset also from logitech, and a XBox 360 controller attached I don't know if that last bit is necessary. Those are all the specs I can think of.

I was wondering if it could be a power supply problem. The restarts only happen about once or twice a month and can restart once a hour for several hours.

Also how do I know this isn't some glitch in BIOS? I also thought the PC was overheating at times but from what I see in CoreTemp the Temperatures are fine.

 

If you fill in the details of your system here it will tell you if your PSU has power enough.

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

 

well i put in exactly what's in my computers, says i should get atleast 330Watts, but my psu is 220 Watt max...never had any problems whatsoever...must be underrated??